What Healthcare Can Learn From a Proud Data Parasite

Some might call him a data parasite, but Paul Pavlidis, PhD, doesn’t mind. “It’s a slur that we now embrace,” he tells Healthcare Analytics News™. “It’s a good thing.”

He borrowed the title from a 2016 New England Journal of Medicineop-ed in which its editor-in-chief described the potential for “research parasites” to take advantage of an open data-sharing system, though forms of the label had been around before that article. So, what is a data parasite? “We don’t generate data; we just take it from other people,” says Pavlidis, a psychiatry professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

And that is a good thing: It’s researchers like him who scrutinize the work of others, ensuring information reliability and integrity, and examine data sets to identify other uses that the original investigators might have overlooked.